Cleveland Museum of Art makes 30,000 works of art available for download, remix, and reuse.

January 28, 2019

The Cleveland Museum of Art announced on Wednesday, January 23, that it is now an Open Access institution, using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation for high-resolution images and data as related to its collection. This is their open access announcement which was live-streamed.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access means the public now has the ability to share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of many as 30,000 public-domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection. Downloaded art may be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In addition, portions of collections information (metadata) for more than 61,000 artworks, both in the public domain and those works with copyright or other restrictions, works are now available. Here’s their promo reel.

Learn more about how the CMA’s local, national, and international partners are already using and magnifying public domain artworks in the collection: Launch Partner Projects

In conjunction with this new initiative, the museum is launching its newly redesigned online collection to make it easy for individuals, scholars, students, and virtual visitors to have access to a wealth of information on art. This includes up to 35 fields of metadata with descriptive text, creating more possibilities for semantic relationships, contextual interpretations, and translations related to artworks in the collection. In addition, the museum’s website will allow visitors to choose the view that is best for them, whether it’s text-heavy or image-focused. The CMA has also added a refined advanced search to make finding artworks simple and intuitive. This improved feature is powered by Microsoft’s Azure search-as-a-service cloud solution and will enable users to search by specific fields, providing art historians and enthusiasts alike an opportunity to dive deeper into the collection. A newly incorporated elastic search improves the accuracy of results, including the ability to sort more easily. An auto-complete search bar proposes potential searches and suggests correct spellings for artist names.